Golden Tide Survive Kane Comeback, Win 9-7

CURWENSVILLE – The Curwensville Area High School baseball team scored in just one inning while its pitchers yielded nine walks to visiting Kane on Monday afternoon.

Somehow and someway the Golden Tide hung on to defeat the comeback minded Wolves, 9-7, to pick up their fourth win in the last five games and improve to 5-6 on the 2014 campaign.

Kane remains winless at 0-6.

As Curwensville head coach Denny Johns put it afterwards, “We had one big offensive inning and made it stand up, but this was not one of our better games of the year.”

Curwensville scored all of the runs they would need in the third inning when nine Golden Tide touched home plate. And that was it for the day.

Trailing 1-0 going into the bottom of the third frame, the Tide batted around with the highlight being a bases loaded triple by senior Tanner Elensky who earlier in the inning had an RBI single. The afternoon was good to Elensky with three hits, four RBI’s and two runs scored.

Brett Gardner had a single to drive home two runs while A. J. Bloom added an RBI single to boost the Golden Tide attack.

The Tide also stranded a runner at third base three times, in the first, second and fourth innings.

Kane scratched out two runs in the fourth, one in the fifth and three more in the seventh to draw close to the Tide before Bloom came in to shut the door in the top of the seventh and preserve the victory.

Bloom, coming in with no outs, got the Wolves to ground into a double play and pick up a strike out to end the valiant Kane comeback attempt.

The effort by Bloom was not lost on Johns, who said, “I give A. J. an awful lot of credit for coming into a tough situation there in the seventh inning. He threw a double play ball and got the strikeout to put the game away. That was big for us today.”

Jake Lister led Kane with two hits on the afternoon.

Each squad had eight hits, but the Wolves also picked up those nine walks and stranded 10 base runners.

Johns finished by commenting, “We certainly didn’t swing the bats well except for the one big inning; but thankfully these guys found a way to hang on and win. Sometimes you just win ugly and today was one of those days.”

The Golden Tide will play in St. Marys on Wednesday at 4:15 pm against Elk County Catholic. The Crusaders defeated the Curwensville earlier this season, 3-1.